The Bush Library's Most Frustrating Exhibit

DALLAS — When I was in elementary school, I devoured "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Perfect for a child with little desire to finish anything — a sad reality that continues to this day — the series allowed every precocious brat to create the novel they were reading. Don't like getting lost in caves? Great, swim across a lake instead. Hate lakes? Here's a werewolf wizard.

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Every title was a revision in progress, a crutch for readers and writers who couldn't figure out how to finish a damn book.

The spirit of the series lives on today at America's latest iteration of the amusement park: the presidential library. When the George W. Bush Presidential Center opens to the public May 1, visitors will have the opportunity to visit Decision Points Theater, Bush's werewolf wizard. The theater sits past a gnarled hunk of World Trade Center steel, past the donor wall that reminds visitors that yes, the nations of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates did help build this museum (just as the Saudi royal family helped fund Bill Clinton's), past a stunning collection of swords and sabres from countries that could probably use all that gold and silver, and finally past an exhibit showcasing the forty-third president's lasting but mostly forgotten AIDS work. Once in the theater, guests stand behind a series of touch screens, and vote on the Bush-era maelstrom they'd like to revisit: the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, or the Iraq troop surge.

After selecting their mess of choice, users watch videos of advisers — a most unbelievable collection of multi-cultural actors playing White House yes-men, military officers, and local officials — and then vote on whether they would make the same choices Bush did. On Wednesday, I stood with a national NPR reporter, two local TV reporters, and a few others. We selected the Iraq invasion.

Images of Saddam Hussein flashed across the screen, and I picked a Defense Department official as my first confidant.

"Look, we have 150,000 troops sitting on Iraq's border," said the sharply coifed man with the square jaw. "Backing down now sends Saddam another signal that the U.S. is weak. We'd also be saying there are no consequences for defying the U.N."

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I barreled through U.N. experts, White House officials, and CIA spooks in the few minutes allotted. (Despite my search there was no Colin Powell clone whispering his Pottery Barn rule, "You break it, you own it.") After a barrage of BREAKING NEWS — Missile systems! Global protests! — we decided on option two: seek a new U.N. resolution. Bush greeted us on-screen, to tell us how wrong we were in his trademark matter-of-fact way.

"Saddam posed too big a risk to ignore...the world was made safer by his removal."

OK then, that settles it — finally.

We were then prodded to pick another exercise, Hurricane Katrina this time, and the dance began again. It's telling that Bush — minus the hosts of the exercise, former Chiefs of Staff Josh Bolton and Andy Card — is the only actual official recorded for this exhibit, and, for the most part, present in the library at all. Rumsfeld and Cheney make obligatory cameos, mostly in news footage, while Laura Bush's ballgowns and the First Dogs get full displays.

Bush has this luxury, though, because it's his library. It's one that doesn't completely sugarcoat the past — "He wanted to put out the facts, explain what happened, and let people decide for themselves," Bush advisor Karen Hughes said Wednesday — but tilts it just so. The public likely received its greatest "Yeah, maybe Iraq wasn't the best idea" message when a display read, "no stockpiles of WMDs were found," and then, snapping back from the ether, the display concluded, "post-invasion inspections confirmed that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to resume production."

Decision Points Theater succeeded, though, in one shining way: it made all of us feel like we actually had a say, a voice, for those four minutes. It took me back to the werewolf wizards. This time I think I might go for a dip in the lake.

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